Checklist for publishing microscopy data

A lot of published articles with microscopic data do not adequately describe how the data were generated, making such studies irreproducible. 

QuaRep Limi, full name "Quality Assessment and Reproducibility for Instruments & Images in Light Microscopy", is an international consortium of over 700 scientists/microscopists who wish to strengthen the reproducibility of microscopic data. One part of this effort, channeled in Workgroup 11, is to provide a list of minimal metadata that should be published with every(!) microscopic data set. Many experiments will require additional descriptions, but this list is the bare minimum that should always be covered

The respective table, together with some explanations, was now published as an article by the Journal of Cell Biology. In the pdf-version, the table covers less than 1.5 pages. We strongly recommend to the users of the Core Facility Bioimaging to check if the methods part of their manuscript, whether article or thesis, comply with this list. Disclosure: Steffen Dietzel, head of the Core Facility Bioimaging, is a member of WG11 and coauthor of this article.

To cite from the article:

"The checklist is guided by three key principles:

1. Clarity: making microscopy metadata terminology understandable for all users, with representative examples of how to describe each parameter.
2. Practicality: ensuring that requirements are achievable in everyday research environments by experts and nonexperts alike.
3. Ease of adoption: enabling implementation across disciplines, journals, and institutions.

Should any of our users have difficulties finding any of those required data, the Core Facility staff is available to help."

The article is the following: 

Better reporting is better science: Community-defined minimal reporting requirements for light microscopy

J Cell Biol (2026) 225 (3): e202601032

https://rupress.org/jcb/article/225/3/e202601032/281525/Better-reporting-is-better-science-Community

https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.202601032

Image processing

A similar effort of Quarep-Limi Workgroup 12 on the description of image processing and analyzing procedures led to this publication: Community-developed checklists for publishing images and image analyses,
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-023-01987-9